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Conference Report: 14th biennial Lessons & Legacies Conference

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Conference Report: 14th biennial Lessons & Legacies Conference, sponsored by the Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern University and Claremont McKenna College, November 3-6, 2016, Claremont, CA

By Martina Cucchiara, Bluffton University

At this year’s Lessons & Legacies Conference, a number of scholars presented on the Catholic Church in Europe under Nazism and Fascism.

On Friday, Jonathan Huener (University of Vermont) presented his study on the little-known Nonnenlager Schmückert, a labor camp for Polish nuns in the Reichsgau Wartheland. Between February 1941 and January 1945, the Gestapo, in collaboration with the Reichsstatthalter’s office of Arthur Greiser (via the Gau Self-Administration), imprisoned over six hundred nuns in the camp. In his analysis of the camp, Huener emphasized the intersections and conflicts “between ideology and economic rationality” in the Nazis’ anti-Church policies in the Warthegau. Initially, the regime’s persecution of the Polish Catholic Church, that included the dissolution of cloisters and the imprisonment of nuns, was crucial to germanization measures in the Gau. As a key symbol of “Polish national consciousness,” the Nazis viewed the destruction of the Polish Catholic Church as tantamount to the destruction of the Polish nation. Nuns in their conspicuous habits thus represented the dual threat of Catholicism and fanatical Polish nationalism and animated the Gestapo’s efforts to imprison the women in 1941. But if the initial imprisonment of nuns was driven by ideology, Huener argued that by 1942, severe labor shortages became the main impetus for the Gau administration’s renewed efforts to round up and incarcerate the remaining nuns in the Warthegau. Attempts to use nuns as forced laborers at Schmückert failed, however. Still, although most of the women were simply too ill to work, Huener concluded that the camp’s continued existence shows both the “regime’s commitment to incarcerating and exploiting its alleged enemies,” and its “obsession with Polish Catholicism as an inherently dangerous and conspiratorial locus of anti-German, Polish-national sentiment.”

On Saturday, the panel “Antisemitism and Catholicism during the Holocaust” focused on manifestations of and responses to antisemitism in the Catholic Church in Germany, France, and Italy under Nazism.

Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College) and Martina Cucchiara (Bluffton University) explored the topic through the lens Erna Becker-Kohen, a Catholic of Jewish heritage, whose writings the presenters have translated and annotated. The volume, The Evil that Surrounds Us: The Writings of Erna Becker Kohen, is forthcoming in 2017 from Indiana University Press. Overwhelmed by fear and isolation in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Erna converted to Catholicism in 1936. The history of Catholics of Jewish heritage primarily has been told from the perspective of the Catholic hierarchy. Focusing on the experience of one Catholic of Jewish heritage, Spicer and Cucchiara lowered their gaze to illuminate the consequences of the Catholic hierarchy’s refusal to take a clear stance on Jews, even Catholics of Jewish heritage, in Nazi Germany. Largely leaving their flock to their own devices, Church leaders did little to check the pervasive antisemitism and malice that Erna routinely encountered in Catholic parishes and women religious communities. Nonetheless, Erna, along with a small number of German Jews, did benefit from the Catholic Church’s feeble intervention on their behalf when the regime refrained from dissolving marriages between Jews and non-Jews. On account of her “privileged” marriage to a non-Jewish man, Erna therefore was exempt, for a time, from the most severe anti-Jewish decrees, including deportation. But, as Spicer and Cucchiara argued, the Church’s contribution to the protection of “privileged” Jews was incidental, as the episcopate first and foremost sought to defend its traditional right to govern marriage. The Church did not intervene when the Nazis deported Catholics of Jewish heritage or when they imprisoned the “Aryan” partners of Jews in the fall of 1944 to force them to divorce their Jewish spouses. Erna felt the full brunt of this policy of silence when the regime imprisoned her “Ayran” husband Gustav in a labor camp. Erna and her young son Silvan struggled to survive the war and the Holocaust in southern Germany and Tyrol. Gustav, too, survived but eventually succumbed to severe injuries he sustained during his time of imprisonment.

In her presentation “Catholic Antisemitism in France and Italy during the Holocaust,” Nina Valbousquet (Sciences Po Paris) also raised the issue of intermarriage, albeit in post-Fascist Italy in 1943. Following Mussolini’s fall, Father Tacchi Venturi, a member the Italian Catholic clergy, advocated for the abolition of provisions of the Fascist racial laws of 1938 that forbade intermarriages between Jews and non-Jews. At the same time, he also lobbied the Italian Ministry of the Interior to retain certain antisemitic provisions that in his estimation were consistent with Catholic traditions and principles. Valbousquet argued that Venturi’s position was representative of members of the Catholic clergy in Fascist Italy and Vichy France who disavowed Nazi antisemitism as un-Christian but continued to spread “acceptable” forms of antisemitism. In their promotion of Catholic antisemitic propaganda that conflated traditional Christian anti-Jewish prejudices with modern secular antisemitic stereotypes, the Church became complicit in legitimizing anti-Jewish laws and measures in France and Italy. From here it was but a small step for some Catholic activists during World War II to cast Fascist antisemitic laws as “a legitimate self-defense of Christian civilization” against World Jewry. At the very least, Valbousquet concluded, Catholic antisemitic propaganda contributed to widespread indifference to the suffering of Jews, and for this reason the topic deserves far greater scholarly attention that it has received so far.

Suzanne Brown-Fleming (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) also sought answers to the Catholic Church’s apparent indifference to the persecution of Jews in the months following Hitler’s ascension to power. In particular, she examined the intersection between the Catholic Church’s response to the regime’s treatment of Jews and Catholics in 1933. Brown-Fleming argued that scholars must consider the Nazis’ treatment of Jews and Catholics together in order to gain a fuller understanding of the Church’s silence about the escalating persecution of Jews in 1933. Drawing on files from the Vatican secret archives, Brown-Fleming painted a vivid picture of discussions between the Vatican and the German episcopate on how to respond to the new regime’s persecution of Jews. In the end, Church leaders remained silent because, in the words of Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, should the Church defend Jews, “the war against the Jews would also become a war against the Catholics.” Whereas Brown-Fleming attributed the Catholic Church’s silence about Jews mainly to fears for its own flock, implicitly, she raised yet another intriguing reason for the Church’s public indifference to the suffering of Jews. It appears that upon Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933, many Catholics were not fearful but enthusiastic about the new regime. Some younger Catholics chafed against the ban on Catholic membership in the NSDAP that the Fulda Bishops’ Conference had issued in 1930. Cesare Orsenigo the Vatican nuncio in Berlin, went so far as warning the Vatican in 1933 that the Church should take care not to alienate the many “National Socialist Catholics,” lest they left the Church. Although Brown-Fleming did not explicitly make the argument, she nonetheless raised the question whether the Catholic Church remained silent about the persecution of Jews not just because they feared a war against Catholics but because they feared losing the support of large segments of Catholics whose enthusiasm for the new regime clearly outweighed their trepidations about Nazism.

 

 

 

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Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, August 3-14, 2015.

By Victoria Barnett, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The rise of fascism, ethno-nationalism, and antisemitism after 1918 was a transnational phenomenon. Across Europe, fascist and nationalist groups, many of them religiously aligned, began to appear, laying the foundation for the subsequent involvement of these groups and their sympathizers in the Holocaust. This research workshop conducted a broader comparative examination of this phenomenon among Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches from different regions in Europe, with the goal of better understanding the broader dynamics at work as well as the specific factors that motivated each group.  What political, cultural, and theological factors in the different religious traditions and regions facilitated the appearance of such groups? Were they aware of and in touch with each other, and what theological or ideological features did they share?  How did religious leaders, theologians, and institutions in the respective countries and churches respond to these developments?  While much research has been done on groups like the German Deutsche Christen and the Romanian Iron Guard, relatively little has been done on the other smaller groups and individuals who played a role—although such movements can be found in all three of the major Christian churches, despite significant theological and ecclesiastical differences between and within Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity.

Three central themes emerged from the workshop discussions: 1) the challenges of understanding the role of “religion” in these developments; 2) the diverse forms of ethno-nationalism and fascism that appear in this period; and 3) the significance of antisemitism as a bridge between these radical groups. Discussions about religion addressed the complexity of the theological understandings and institutional realities of the three traditions, as well as the often-overlooked role of transnational movements and ecumenical organizations. Even within a single tradition like Catholicism, for example, there were very different levels of action, ranging from the role of Vatican officials, to regional bishops’ conferences responding to events in places like Poland, Slovakia, and Germany, to radical individuals like the pro-fascist Monsignor Umberto Benigni in Rome and Charles Maurras, who become a leading voice in the right-wing French Aktion Française. Daniela Kalkandjieva’s presentation on the Russian Orthodox churches identified the very distinct traditions and groups that fell under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, with one group in particular, the Karlovci Synod, emerging as an antisemitic movement that had a transnational following. Other points of discussion included Samuel Koehne’s analysis of Nazi racialized ideology as a kind of “ethnotheism” that resonated among pro-fascist groups but alarmed other bodies, such as the Protestant ecumenical movement and interfaith movements which were driven by an explicit anti-nationalism and anti-racism, particularly in the United States.

The acknowledgment of the complexity of these religious dynamics shaped the workshop approach to the history of fascism and ethno-nationalism, particularly in terms of the different religious “players” that surfaced in these radical movements: religious institutions and organizations, religiously aligned political parties, individual clergy, theologians, and public intellectuals.  The differences and similarities between such figures as the Slovakian priest and political leader Josef Tiso, German Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller, the Romanian theologian Fr. Liviu Stan, and French Mgr. Ernest Jouin, co-publisher of the radically antisemitic  Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes, were explored.

While none of these figures can be understood independently of the political circumstances that brought them to prominence, it became clear that the primary “bridge” issue among them was the hatred of Jews.  While the roots of such antisemitic discourse rested deep in early Christian theology, more modern forms of racialized, socio-economic, and nationalist antisemitism gained steam in many parts of Europe between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s. In some of the groups studied antisemitism was the dominant theme; in others it converged with ethnic divisions, anti-Communism, and localized political factors.

In many ways this workshop served as a preliminary exploration of a number of important issues for further study. Even these preliminary research findings, however, illustrate that an understanding of the role of “religion” or the churches during the Holocaust cannot be gained purely from the study of specific cases such as the German churches, and that there is much to learn from a comparative look at the entire religious landscape of that era.

The participants in this workshop and their topics are listed here:

  • Pantelis Anastasakis (independent scholar, New York): “The Church of Greece and the Holocaust: The Limits of the Ethnarchic Tradition”
  • Victoria Barnett (USHMM): “International Protestant Ecumenical Interpretations of the Rise of Nazism, Fascism, and Antisemitism during the 1920s and 1930s”
  • Ionut Biliuta (currently at the Simon Wiesenthal Institute for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Vienna, Austria): “When ‘God Was a Fascist’: The Antisemitic Radicalization of the Orthodox Theology under the Impact of Fascism in Interwar Romania”
  • Giuliana Chamedes (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “The Vatican, Catholic Internationalism, and Nation-Building”
  • James Felak (University of Washington): “Catholicism, Anti-Semitism, and the Radical Right in Interwar Slovakia and Beyond”
  • Daniela Kalkandjieva (Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria): “Russian Orthodoxy, Fascism and Nationalism”
  • Samuel Koehne (Deakin University, Victoria, Australia): “Racist, Brutal, Revolutionary: A Conservative Christian View of Nazism by 1933”
  • Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College): “Antisemitism, Catholicism, and Judaism in Germany 1918-1945”
  • Nina Valbousquet (D. Candidate at the Sciences Po Paris, France): “An Anti-Semitic International? Catholic and Far-Right Connections in Monsignor Benigni’s Roman Network (1918-1930s)”
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